What's the most depressingly, pointlessly offensive film you've ever seen? Offhand, I can't think of a more repellent recent example than Crank: High Voltage – and that includes the films of Eli Roth, Gaspar Noé and Hannah Montana. A sequel to the silly, overblown but goofily enjoyable original tale of a hitman compelled to keep himself alive by constant jolts of adrenaline, the film announces its intentions from its opening moment, as our antihero, who has apparently died, is shovelled off the sidewalk and fitted with an artificial heart by a group of unscrupulous Chinese gangsters. He then spends the rest of the film attempting to retrieve his real heart.

Further extreme violence ­follows, one of the more charming moments of which includes a woman being shot in her breast implants and the ensuing leakage that follows. There are countless other scenes like this; throwing away the comparative restraint and good-naturedness of the original, the sequel seems content to wallow in mean-spirited unpleasantness, apparently on the grounds that not enough films these days feature, say, graphic genital torture or a man slicing off his own nipples.

The writers and directors of the Crank films bill themselves as Neveldine/Taylor, perhaps to split the blame. Although, predictably, a hardcore fan base has congregated to defend the film in excitable terms, its poor showing at the US box office speaks volumes, with the potential audience perhaps sickened by the film's extreme misogyny and racism. Watching Jason Statham making jokes about "chinks" doesn't make the film edgy or daring; instead, it places it in the same regrettable vein of humour as Bernard Manning and Love Thy Neighbour. One imagines that Neveldine/Taylor would never have dared to feature such racial slurs about black people; so why on earth is it acceptable to do it about another ethnic group?

However, this depressing trend in trying to appal rather than entertain audiences seems to be catching on. Danny Leigh's article about the new Seth Rogen film, Observe and Report, made many salient arguments about the picture. Danny's points, and the subsequent discussion, about the semi-date-rape scene that occurs about halfway through the film are all worthwhile, but I think that focusing purely on what might be the most self-consciously offensive scene (albeit one that was featured in the adult-oriented trailer) ignores the highly transgressive content of much of the rest of it. Racism? Violence against children? Alcoholism? Mental illness? Check, check and check again. On and on the laundry list of offence goes, dutifully ticked off with an air somewhere between gleeful and perverse.

The film's comparatively poor box-office showing can be blamed on misleading marketing, attempting to sell it as a comedy in much the same vein as Rogen's previous successes Knocked Up and Pineapple Express, whereas in fact the writer/director Jody Hill has publicly declared he sees the film as being closer in feel to Taxi Driver. (In fact, it's more like an inferior version of The King of Comedy. It is possible to make a case for it being at least different to the usual comparable Hollywood fare, although, as Peter Bradshaw wrote in his review: "I'm all for bad taste and black comedy and gross-out … but it has to be funny." The only laughs audible in the screening I attended were ones of shocked disbelief.

As Bradshaw notes, nothing should be off limits in comedy, and, indeed, films such as In Bruges and Pulp Fiction acquired praise for the way in which they brilliantly dovetail horror and hilarity. Yet neither Crank: High Voltage nor Observe and Report are worthy of comparison. Instead, the flashy, arrogant emptiness of both films reveals their creators to be little more than self-conscious provocateurs, trying their hardest to shock and disturb, but with less success than the gimmicks of a William Castle flick. The shopping-mall flasher whose actions become the catalyst of Observe and Report is an apt metaphor for these would-be titans of comedy: once you've got over the initial shock, there's really very little to see.